Top stories concerning British Isles ancestral research from Irish born Scottish based professional family historian, author and tutor Chris Paton. Feel free to quote from this blog, but please credit British GENES if you do so. Should you wish to get in touch, contact me at christopherpaton @ tiscali.co.uk. Happy hunting!

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Wednesday, 21 September 2011

Hugh Wallis batch numbers site problem

The popular Hugh Wallis website (http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~hughwallis/IGIBatchNumbers.htm), which lists batch numbers for the old IGI, is currently experiencing problems in progressing searches further beyond the identification of the batch number. Where before you could click on a batch number and then perform a search on the returned page for a particular set of microfilmed records, now you receive the following message:

Due to changes on the LDS site this facility is currently unavailable

I am investigating a solution but have no estimate for when it will be available. Please check back in a few days to see if I've figured it out. In the meantime please make use of the batch numbers on my site when accessing the LDS site via their provided interface. For more information on the updates to the LDS site please visit their news release here.

The batch numbers are still listed on Hugh Wallis's site, however, and can be utilised in the Advanced Search field on new FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org).

The IGI search for Scottish records on Scots Origins (www.origins.net/SOWelcome.aspx) still works however, allowing searches by parish without a batch number. The parish descriptions are a bit odd though, now listing years well beyond 1875. For example, Perth is listed as Perth (1559-1971). Despite this, when you perform a search, the results are still only returned up to 1875, confirming that the results are being drawn from the IGI still on old FamilySearch, and not the new Historical Records database on new FamilySearch.